IMAGINE how miserable you would feel if you parked in town all day on Saturday and then returned to your car to find you’d been robbed. It happened to me.

We are told not to leave valuables in the car, so I had my phone and my wallet on me, but I still lost £22 in cash.

To add insult to injury, there was no point in reporting it to the police, because this particular daylight robbery was perfectly legal. It was a parking fee.

You might think, from the amount involved, that we had parked on yellow lines or the wheel clampers were out, but you’d be wrong.

It was in the Brunel North car park in Farnsby Street and £22 was how much the ticket machine demanded when we returned to pick up our car.

There was no error. That’s how much it actually costs to park in town all day on a Saturday. TWENTY TWO POUNDS!

Now, you’re probably thinking that there are cheaper places to park and if I’d read the notice or tried another car park, I would have saved myself a lot of money. But how was I to know?

When I usually go in town I’m either walking or cycling, but this time I was helping to organise an all-day event and had lots to carry, so did what most people would do, and chose the most convenient car park.

I never dreamt it would cost £22, so I didn’t think to check how much I would need to pay on my exit.

I’m sure revenue from parking helps keep our council taxes down, but I’m sorry to tell shopkeepers in the town centre that money is tight these days and although I would have happily spent my £22 on supporting them and the local economy, you can only spend it once.

But that’s the least of their worries. We are now thinking that the last place we will go to in future and stay any length of time is Swindon town centre.

For £22 we can take the train and spend a nice day in Bath or Oxford, or drive to Ikea in Bristol, or do what we have done for the last two years and get our Christmas shopping in convenient and welcoming Cirencester.

And if we want to spend our next £22 on shopping instead of parking, we can also choose from a range of retail parks in Swindon, including the ever-busy Outlet Village.

Or we can spend it online and leave the car on the drive, where parking is free.

So this is a bigger issue than my £22, and it’s especially pertinent to those of us who remember the concept and the appeal of “going in town”.

It’s what people of a certain age used to do on Saturday afternoons in Swindon, almost as a kind of ritual. You might not have had anything specific to buy, but still went for a look, and probably stopped off in British Home Stores for a cup of tea.

Discouraging people from staying is no way to regenerate town centre culture.

Most of the people I speak to now tell me they only go into town if they are on a mission, such as the friend who hadn’t been for years, but needed an appointment at the optician’s – and got an eye-opener in more ways than one.

I’m not saying that free parking is necessarily the answer, but anybody who thinks that heavily penalising those who come into town and intend to do more than just pop into one shop and leave is, quite frankly, parking mad.